Lake Belle may take over my life, and considering I just threw the name at the place in hope that a “perfect” name would come along later, it’s a good thing I’ve grown to like it.

The town is a mix of my hometown (which need not be named because, hey, some people love the place) and a town in the book The Truth about Unicorns. I loved the malevolent woods in that story and have always wanted such woods for my own. The blog doesn’t get to capture that, or at least I haven’t figured out how it could. But in the novel, people die in those woods, get lost in those woods, get shoved out of those woods or sucked in…

Characters don’t describe a place the way a narrator does. A narrator can get, well I don’t want to get flowery or silly, but where a writer is tempted to write about the humidity coating the leaves, a 19-year-old girl just says it’s frigging hot.

But one day the novels will be out in the world (they could!) and I’ll be interested to see how the Lake Belle of the blogosphere compares to the Lake Belle of the written page.